Smoking, Marriage and Climate: What Can I Do? (2)

This week I have a guest blogger, Doug Glancy, who was one of the student advocates responsible for starting my class on climate change problem solving. Doug’s piece continues the series in response to the question, “What can I do about climate change?” It is a call for social organization.

What Smoking and Marriage Equality Can Teach Activists About Efforts to Catalyze Climate Action

In February, Duke University released a poll that found that more than 84% of Americans believe climate change is occurring. Climate activists were elated, and many began to say that we’ve turned the corner on efforts to catalyze action. However, beneath the encouraging headline was a far more important number: only one third of Americans support federal efforts to address the issue. I am not discounting the fact that the vast majority of Americans now believe climate change is occurring. However, overselling this statistic is fraught with peril, as it is the second number that defines our direction when the rubber hits the road.

For affirmation of this belief, one need only look at the decades-long struggle to reduce smoking. As early as the 1950’s, the majority of doctors believed smoking posed significant health risks. By the 1970’s, the majority of Americans believed that smoking had deleterious effects. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the late 80’s that overall smoking rates began to plummet. The transition did not occur because a doctor or scientist said smoking was bad for one’s health, it occurred because smoking became socially unacceptable.

Unfortunately, in the battle to address climate change we do not have the luxury of time for opinion to sway. Fortunately, the strategic marriage of behavioral economics and technology provides the tools to speed up the pendulum. What is needed now is messaging which leverages cutting edge research into why we make the choices we do including core drivers such as moral conviction, a desire for equality and good old-fashioned peer pressure. (For a quick introduction read Contagious by Jonah Berger).

One need only look to the events of last week to see how opinions can change in a timeframe exponentially quicker than in the past. As recently as the late 90’s, the vast majority of American opposed extending marriage rights to the LBGT community. Just over a decade later, over half the nation supports marriage rights.

There is little doubt that some of the explanation for this remarkable achievement lies with Americans expanding their view of morality and furthering equality. However, it would be shortsighted to discount the tremendous impact of peer pressure. Last week, despite little coordinated effort, nearly 3 million Americans changed their Facebook profile to support marriage equality. These 3 million individual decisions provided a social cue to tens of millions more.

What does this all mean for the efforts to address climate change? It means that we must move beyond statistics about the beliefs of 99% scientists. It means we must move beyond over-reliance on frames, such as the plight of the polar bear, which only speak to certain segments of society. It means we must make addressing climate the moral imperative of the day and use technology-assisted peer pressure to spread the message. We have the knowledge and technology to be good ancestors, its time to leverage it.

Doug has over a decade working on climate, energy and sustainability issues across the public, private and nonprofit sectors. He holds a BS in Political Science from Trinity College and MBA/MS from the University of Michigan, where he focused on climate change and corporate sustainability. In addition to speaking engagements, Doug has contributed to a groundbreaking report on Corporate Climate Change Strategies for the Pew Center on Climate Change, and led two delegations to the United Nations Climate Change Conference. He is an Executive Board member of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters.

I'm reading about all of these doom and gloom predictions, most of which fail to materialize, and I'm reading about the flooding in parts of the north. Well isn't flooding part of our weather history in the spring, when snowmelt accumulates and flows where it's supposed to? In days passed, the Midwest has always had flooding in spring, but now it's climate change. These blogs and articles on flooding also fail to mention that there's a low pressure system passing through the country at this time, bringing low temperatures throughout the whole nation, including the deep south. In April. What about that, climate-changers? Why not a blog or article on that development?

I read the text here and get real frustrated. In my learning about history in the past many years, it stands out that there has been a continuous climate change for as long as man has kept records. We know that there was a much higher amount of CO2 in the air 1000 years ago than in recent history. This produced an era of vastly better health which was recorded in Europe. Also, it was not accompanied by ocean levels dozens of feet higher than now. Then we had a mini ice age the middle of the last millenium. The climate has been changing wildly without any help from us. It's time to change the discussion and stop chasing multi-trillion dollar solutions. We need to be aware of our polution and limit it as much as reasonably possible without affecting folks' lifestyle. None of this drastic increase in the cost of living from "carbon exchanges." Our greatest threat to the earth comes from sources like massive output of garbage per person, coming shortage of water, destruction of available farmland for residential expansion, etc. Global warming; oops I forgot ya'll dropped that name since your theory is being destroyed by the facts. Now you call it "climate change" which is a perfectly natural event that is continuing as it has forever. We're spending trillions chasing our tail when real life problems get little attention. What if the money was used to educate folks on the need to recycle, to conserve water, the need to be careful what we put in landfills, the need to reduce our consumption of farmland. This would be 1000 times more productive than the current effort to extort money for a natural process we cannot forecast accurately and have to alter data just to keep the money streaming in.

Unfortunately, like most science articles, it's full of anecdotes instead of actual information. Concentrations of "high," "low," and "clean" don't say much without a precise unitary definition of what they called "high" and "low".

If the crabs and oysters survived the Triassic, then surely they'll survive now.

Well, I didn't post this because I thought oysters are going extinct. I thought that others might also be interested in yet another unforeseen consequence of our quickly changing biosphere. The changes are happening all around us as biofeedback gains momentum trying to adjust to the now poisonous ecosystems, and all the new empty energy niche's that nature wants to refill. Why you would decide to fistfight over this simple article posted for general interest, not to "prove" anyone's point is beyond me.

As for over harvesting creating more problems than pollution... I guess that would be site specific. If you lived on Indian River lagoon and had lost 32,000 acres of sea grass in a year and a half. And lost 80 manatees in 8 months, 47 manatees and 230 brown pelicans on thirty days due to nutrient driven algae blooms maybe you might reconsider that statement.

Quoting FLwolverine:There's an interesting thread over at the Arctic Sea Ice Forum titled "When and How Bad?". Here's the question as posed. Even if you don't have the same sense of impending doom that some of us have, the discussion is - well - interesting, especially the first reply to this question by ccgwebmaster. Link. There's also a thread on best case scenarios, but almost everyone on there admits they're just dreaming.

"Seeing as it seems inevitable that recent Climate Change will cause disaster beyond which humanity, at the present population, can adapt to with present agricultural practises.

So the main question is, which would be in the back of people's minds for a long time, when will we see the full extent of the climactic disaster and how bad is it likely to be.

Would it be the same as what is described in the Personal Consequences Thread whereas it ends up with a bleak world similar to that of "The Road" with people struggling for food and eating each other.

One could also wonder how soon this could strike, would this be something that we would see in a decade or so, or could it be just around the corner in let's say during the next month or so or during the next year at most."

Without government enforced social programs and anti-monopoly laws, Dystopia is the result of capitalism. history has repeatedly shown this to be the case in the past, and some logical thought about it shows why computers, robots, and automated systems will make this true in the future as well.

Let's take an example. If you evaluate the worth of human beings by the products and services they provide, which capitalism does, then you reach some sobering conclusions.

When an employer highers an employee, some of what they are paying for is the cost of driving to work, the employees cost of living and entertainment.

When an employer buys a robot or other automated system capable of doing the same job, they pay only for productivity. This means fewer jobs for humans.

Later the robot making factory figures out how to make robots which make other robots. This means fewer jobs for humans.

Somewhere along the lines, there are very few jobs for humans, and tycoons own everything, and modern and historical currency-based economics make no sense.

If someone doesn't make money, they can't buy food, clothing, shelter, never mind other products.

The Republicans would just say, "Get a job, you bum..."

...but if robots do all the jobs which don't require a p.h.d., and a significant number of people simply can't pass the curricula at universities, either because of bad professors, generational situations like poorly educated family base, too busy doing their part time job (if they even have one) to stay alive, etc, etc, then there is no remedy for that.

The ACT and SAT prove that not everybody is cut out for STEM, and even those aren't good enough tests. Then the STEM degrees' curricula don't actually prepare students for real world jobs in the fields anyway. In some cases they have lots of course work the student may never use again, or may only use a tiny subset of those skills, yet they have to pay for the entire curricula for a degree and for an employer to recognize them, and in other cases they don't cover the needed skills at all.

If professors were paid based on how many students they successfully train to a standardized metric, rather than just being paid for showing up, it would go a long way to overhaul the basic curricula at universities. If students fail with a 60% then professors who have 60% or few students passing should "fail" too.

Anyway, let's get off that rabbit trail for a minute, and go back onto automation. If you have the technology to make Rosie the Robot, then you don't need humans to do the majority of labor and services we currently pay people: Cleaners, cooks, hospital techs, most entry positions regardless of field, secretaries, accountants, lawyers (a robot would make a better lawyer than a human anyway, or at least would make a better second lawyer on your team than having a second human,) drivers, pilots, meteorologists, statisticians, economists, and much more.

Now consider, when thee algorithms with human-like intelligence can run on computers in a server farm, and don't spend fuel driving to and from work, and don't do irrational things like eat junk food, take vacations, smoke cigarettes, or drink alcohol, then they will be so much cheaper and more efficient than most human workers and thinkers...they'll even have a lower carbon footprint, since they don't breathe off CO2.

Now...you end up with humans having no employment in that scenario too, which means they probably can't buy food under any form of economics currently existing on this planet, so yeah, your riots and wars over food, and land and water rights to grow food, will happen anyway, with or without AGW.

Irrelevant, Borderline Useless Science and History Research

I'm amazed sometimes that students from 50 or 60 years ago graduated high school with more jobs skills than modern high school graduates, in spite of the fact high school spends so much time on maths and sciences. Unfortunately, high school and college spend too much focus on certain irrelevant aspects of history, which would better be replaced with jobs skills.

And I know the cliche quote, which is also true to an extent, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

Yeah, yeah, we all need to know how many times Columbus farted on the way to the U.S. It makes us much more cultured.

I could say a lot about that, like just now I was watching a documentary on Christopher Columbus (just flipped the channel,) on the science channel, and it disgusted me how much money people spend studying irrelevant aspects of history which don't matter one whit to anybody.

Was Columbus a Jew or Not? Who cares? Is it worth paying scores of researchers and historians top dollar to figure it out? Heck no. So why do universities and governments do it? There's no good reason. I don't care whether he was a Jew or not, and I don't care whether he wanted to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem or not, because the first fact will never matter to anybody, and the second fact did not happen, and therefore doesn't matter either.

All of that is a waste of money which could have been spent on hiring better STEM professors, or paying more scholarships, or hiring better career counselors for high school and college students to better communicate options to students.

Maybe universities and governments want to spend ludicrous amounts researching ancient Egypt too, but 99.9% of all facts I've ever heard about ancient Egypt or Egyptian mummies are utterly useless to the modern world. King Tut would have been better left in his grave, with the rest of the mummies, instead, we pay countless "doctors" of archaeology and their staff to waste money digging around in the dirt for ancient relics and mummies, and not producing any product or service worth two cents.

Further, we're paying over a thousand climatologists, paleontologists, geologists, biologists, cosmologists, and other "ists" to drill ice core samples in Antarctica, so they can tell us crap we already know; "Stuff happens, volcanoes happen, meteors happen, CO2 happens, etc, that's life, but wait, wait wait, we need more funding for multiple generations worth of doing the exact same study over and over for the remainder of existence."

Now that we know they're just doing crap we already know, can't they at least be put to work doing something productive, instead of constantly being funneled more funding at the cost of tax payers and students?

So be prepared for all those un-necessary R&D teams to the Arctic and Antarctic, and Paleontologists and Archaeologists digging up stuff that mostly doesn't matter, etc, to pay the carbon tax for all the flying and boating they do.

It would be different if Paleontologists could find an organism that could save us 10% on fuel economy, but they haven't and they wont. It would also be different if Archaeologists found a Stargate or some other "Ancient Aliens" tech, but again, they haven't and they won't. So the majority of what they study is "crap we already know", using government and university funding, which drives up other student's cost who want to go into real professions.

If anybody could present actual, useful technologies or products resulting from these ridiculous expeditions (which wasn't already obvious), you'd have a point, but there aren't any.

Stuff invented by engineers to ENABLE the expedition doesn't count, since that wasn't discovered BY the expedition. A new shoe or a new motor or a new drill might have been invented by the same company for a different reason anyway.

So look at how the "pointless research" regime wastes resources just as much as everyone else.

Do you have any reputable places I can buy inverters, panels, and batteries?

My favorite site to buy solar & such parts is Silicon Solar. They aren't the fastest if it isn't in stock but the prices are great & they have stuff like broke cells you can solder together for 50cent a watt homemade panels.

There's an interesting thread over at the Arctic Sea Ice Forum titled "When and How Bad?". Here's the question as posed. Even if you don't have the same sense of impending doom that some of us have, the discussion is - well - interesting, especially the first reply to this question by ccgwebmaster. Link. There's also a thread on best case scenarios, but almost everyone on there admits they're just dreaming.

"Seeing as it seems inevitable that recent Climate Change will cause disaster beyond which humanity, at the present population, can adapt to with present agricultural practises.

So the main question is, which would be in the back of people's minds for a long time, when will we see the full extent of the climactic disaster and how bad is it likely to be.

Would it be the same as what is described in the Personal Consequences Thread whereas it ends up with a bleak world similar to that of "The Road" with people struggling for food and eating each other.

One could also wonder how soon this could strike, would this be something that we would see in a decade or so, or could it be just around the corner in let's say during the next month or so or during the next year at most."

And realistically there would be offsets to the cost for individuals. Here is the CBO report on offsetting the costs for low income families. Link You can find even more research on proposed offsets. The assumption that the government would allow a carbon tax to negatively effect the individual rather than the intended energy producers is absurd.

A farmer needs fuel whether or not you tax it.

A cannery needs fuel for preserving the food, so we don't waste food. And the company that makes the cans needs fuel.

Fishermen need fuel. There's no electric fishing boats that I know of anyway. This will drive up the price of fish and seafood immensely.

The brick company needs energy for that brick facade on your house, which is a lot safer and storm resistant than siding, so people don't have to keep making repairs.

What they are calling "energy intensive items" is misleading, because what individuals and families spend their money on isn't just limited to direct fuel purchases. The final paragraph on page 3, mentions this, but draws a very questionable conclusion about the effects on workers.

You know, you spend a LOT of money on required things which use a lot of energy in their manufacture and transport: Food, clothing, cleansers and disinfectants, toiletries, residential construction costs, and so on.

Right, and that leads to an increased need for auditors to ensure people aren't cheating the system, and tax preparers, which will eat up much of the money.

"Energy saving investments" is a joke for people in those two income categories, because they either rent, or they own a mobile home, or maybe if they're lucky they might have inherited a home from their grandparents, or they still live with their parents or grandparents.

Estimates of the degree of regressivity of a carbon tax also vary based on analysts’ assumptions about the extent to which the cost of the tax would be passed forward to consumers in the form of higher prices for final goods and services or passed backward to workers and investors in the form of lower wages and lower returns on their investments. To the extent that a carbon tax is passed backward, the tax would be less regressive, potentially even becoming progressive.3

Those statements vary greatly depending on line of work and location, and the people who get hurt by it have little or no control over it. In the most obvious cases I can think of, people businesses are randomly punished, or rewarded, by where they happen to live from before the bill was passed.

That's the problem with regressive taxes. They create more problems than they solve, and then you have to create more government to manage and solve those problems: disincentives to work, random penalties to some people based on where they lived before the law was passed, or based on their level of clientele in some cases.

The things I was suggesting are automatically progressive, by nature, and punish the worst offenses, by nature, and don't require tons more auditors to manage it all.

What makes more sense?

A, Tax everyone, but then spend 10% of the revenues on auditors and other organizations for trying to figure out who to give it back to?

or

B, Tax only the worst excesses of wasteful spending, and needs almost no new auditors?

I will always remember the day I woke to the news that more than 2,000 fires were burning in California. I thought I must not have heard correctly. Two thousand fires? How could that be?

In the end, the state's brave firefighters, joined by contingents from out of state, won the battle. But not before 11 emergency declarations were issued and more than 400,000 acres burned. Countless lives and livelihoods were ruined.

Today, there's a new disaster looming, and although it's not as riveting or dramatic as walls of flames and billowing black smoke, it needs our immediate attention. The draft National Climate Assessment, now being circulated for comment and scheduled for release this year by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, presents a sobering vision of the world that awaits us if we don't act.

This shift could spell disaster for California, long the nation's agricultural powerhouse. The state produces more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S., with an output of $43.5 billion last year. Californians don't rely just on the food produced by the state's farms; they rely on the revenue and the jobs too. Agriculture employs more than 1.5 million people in California.

Loss of land through desertification and drought costs up to five percent of world agricultural gross domestic product (AGDP), or some $450 billion (340 billion euros), every year, said a study presented at a UN conference Tuesday.

Each year an area roughly three times the size of Switzerland is lost through soil degradation, it said, as 870 million people suffer from chronic hunger.

Between four and 12 percent of Africa’s AGDP is lost due to degraded land annually, and in Guatemala the figure is 24 percent, the report said.

In Uzbekistan, food yields have declined by 20-30 percent due to deteriorated land, while in East Africa nearly 3.7 million people need food assistance as a result of the drought of 2011, it said.

You might want to check out Home Power magazine/Web site. They have on-line articles and product reviews for solar, micro-hydro, wind, and vehicles. Some of the articles are by DIYers and some are from professionals in their respective fields.

Quoting RTSplayer:Ok, here's realistic math of the carbon tax proposal for the U.S. for the 3 biggest fossil fuels.

This is using the 12th year numbers. I mentioned some of this earlier.

Oil: $90 to 100 billion per year.

Coal: $120 billion per year.

Gas: $125.8 Billion per year

Total: $346 billion per year.

Real average individual cost:

$346 billion / 315 million people =

$1098.42 per PERSON.

Avg family size: 4.3 persons.

$4723.17 per avg. family...per year...

This is 47.2 times larger than the alleged "$100 per family" stated in the bill proposal, and I haven't even started on chemicals, metals, and all that other stuff.

It looks like who ever did the math for the proposal couldn't tell the difference between $100 and $1000, and they couldn't tell the difference between individuals and families.

Since producers will pass the costs on to the consumer, it means the cost to families will increase by about that much.

One reason this happens is because an enormous amount of natural gas is used by industry because they can get it so cheap and can pipe it around to where it's needed. Therefore, if you tax the carbon dioxide product of natural gas equally to coal or oil, then it will produce a significant spike in prices of products manufactured using natural gas energy. Also the cost of heating homes powered by natural gas will go up dramatically. All you people in the North, especially those who live in big cities, will get absolutely screwed by this, yet you think I'm goofy for complaining about the fuel costs to small contractors. Just wait till when it passes and you see your energy bills.

And realistically there would be offsets to the cost for individuals. Here is the CBO report on offsetting the costs for low income families. Link You can find even more research on proposed offsets. The assumption that the government would allow a carbon tax to negatively effect the individual rather than the intended energy producers is absurd.

For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a renewable power system

By David Roberts

Discussions of how to respond to climate change often involve Very Large Numbers — the needed investments to transition to a fully renewable energy system are in the hundreds of billions. The brain sort of shuts down when it encounters numbers like that. They are too big to fathom. The one thing that does seem true about them is that nobody’s ever going to spend that kind of money on anything. Right? It seems hopeless.

So I always enjoy it when someone comes along to provide some perspective, a comparison that can give us context and help us see the numbers afresh. Today, wind analyst Paul Gipe asks, how much renewable energy could we have gotten from what we spent on the Iraq War?

The total cost of the Iraq War, including future costs to care for veterans, is $2.2 trillion. If we include the interest we have to pay on the debt we used to finance the war, that figure rises to $3.9 trillion by 2053. (See Gipe’s article for sources and details.)

So what could that get us? Gipe gets deep into the weeds on renewables cost and yields, but here’s the top-line conclusion:

If we had invested the $2.2 trillion in wind and solar, the US would be generating 21% of its electricity with renewable energy. If we had invested the $3.9 trillion that the war in Iraq will ultimately cost, we would generate nearly 40% of our electricity with new renewables. Combined with the 10% of supply from existing hydroelectricity, the US could have surpassed 50% of total renewables in supply.

He notes that his estimates are extremely conservative, and with some reasonable amendments, that 40 percent figure could easily become 60 percent.

So, let’s call it half. For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a fully renewable power supply.

Now, imagine if someone had proposed, in 2003, spending $2.2 trillion of public money over the next 10 years on renewable energy. My God, the outrage! The wailing and rending of garments! It would have been scorned, mocked, dismissed outright by VSPs across the land. Such investments in the nation’s future are too expensive; it would bankrupt us; we would never recover.

And yet, the country survived spending that much on the Iraq War. The economy is growing again; the debt is shrinking. And that’s with $2.2 trillion almost entirely flushed down the toilet, to virtually no long-term benefit. The same money spent on renewables would have produced massive returns in energy security and resilience, new industries and jobs, and an international reputation as a courageous humanitarian leader (rather than a belligerent, lying warmonger).

Next time you hear that responding to climate change is too expensive, ask, compared to what?

Been saying that for several years now.

It would actually be much cheaper if you have the government own the turbines, that way you can remove middle men, CEOs, and tycoons' parasitic income levels, and increase system efficiency. Profitability would be possible at a lower cost if everyone was limited to government pay rates.

Ok, here's realistic math of the carbon tax proposal for the U.S. for the 3 biggest fossil fuels.

This is using the 12th year numbers. I mentioned some of this earlier.

Oil: $90 to 100 billion per year.

Coal: $120 billion per year.

Gas: $125.8 Billion per year

Total: $346 billion per year.

Real average individual cost:

$346 billion / 315 million people =

$1098.42 per PERSON.

Avg family size: 4.3 persons.

$4723.17 per avg. family...per year...

This is 47.2 times larger than the alleged "$100 per family" stated in the bill proposal, and I haven't even started on chemicals, metals, and all that other stuff.

It looks like who ever did the math for the proposal couldn't tell the difference between $100 and $1000, and they couldn't tell the difference between individuals and families.

Since producers will pass the costs on to the consumer, it means the cost to families will increase by about that much.

One reason this happens is because an enormous amount of natural gas is used by industry because they can get it so cheap and can pipe it around to where it's needed. Therefore, if you tax the carbon dioxide product of natural gas equally to coal or oil, then it will produce a significant spike in prices of products manufactured using natural gas energy. Also the cost of heating homes powered by natural gas will go up dramatically. All you people in the North, especially those who live in big cities, will get absolutely screwed by this, yet you think I'm goofy for complaining about the fuel costs to small contractors. Just wait till when it passes and you see your energy bills.

For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a renewable power system

By David Roberts

Discussions of how to respond to climate change often involve Very Large Numbers — the needed investments to transition to a fully renewable energy system are in the hundreds of billions. The brain sort of shuts down when it encounters numbers like that. They are too big to fathom. The one thing that does seem true about them is that nobody’s ever going to spend that kind of money on anything. Right? It seems hopeless.

So I always enjoy it when someone comes along to provide some perspective, a comparison that can give us context and help us see the numbers afresh. Today, wind analyst Paul Gipe asks, how much renewable energy could we have gotten from what we spent on the Iraq War?

The total cost of the Iraq War, including future costs to care for veterans, is $2.2 trillion. If we include the interest we have to pay on the debt we used to finance the war, that figure rises to $3.9 trillion by 2053. (See Gipe’s article for sources and details.)

So what could that get us? Gipe gets deep into the weeds on renewables cost and yields, but here’s the top-line conclusion:

If we had invested the $2.2 trillion in wind and solar, the US would be generating 21% of its electricity with renewable energy. If we had invested the $3.9 trillion that the war in Iraq will ultimately cost, we would generate nearly 40% of our electricity with new renewables. Combined with the 10% of supply from existing hydroelectricity, the US could have surpassed 50% of total renewables in supply.

He notes that his estimates are extremely conservative, and with some reasonable amendments, that 40 percent figure could easily become 60 percent.

So, let’s call it half. For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a fully renewable power supply.

Now, imagine if someone had proposed, in 2003, spending $2.2 trillion of public money over the next 10 years on renewable energy. My God, the outrage! The wailing and rending of garments! It would have been scorned, mocked, dismissed outright by VSPs across the land. Such investments in the nation’s future are too expensive; it would bankrupt us; we would never recover.

And yet, the country survived spending that much on the Iraq War. The economy is growing again; the debt is shrinking. And that’s with $2.2 trillion almost entirely flushed down the toilet, to virtually no long-term benefit. The same money spent on renewables would have produced massive returns in energy security and resilience, new industries and jobs, and an international reputation as a courageous humanitarian leader (rather than a belligerent, lying warmonger).

Next time you hear that responding to climate change is too expensive, ask, compared to what?

That's a fact, one which you can observe from the news media, or even by watching CSPAN, or searching the internet about the topic.

We all know China has no emissions standards on their coal plants; not for particles and not for vapors. We know that from the U.S. Embassy and other U.N. nations who have their own equipment for testing air quality. Why are you calling me a racist for pointing it out, when it's a widely accepted fact which even the Chinese people admit, though the Chinese government keeps denying or shifting the issue?

I used a nationality, actually, not a race, but they'd be just as wrong regardless of race or nationality.

Quoting pintada:Derrick Jensen in Endgame, Volume I, states that “The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system.” (127) He continues: Any economic system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid.

I agree with that.

Hah, but you don't get it anyway.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. (2009-02-23). Sacred Demise (p. 282). iUniverse.

I'm amazed at the brilliance with which RTS has defended the denialist position that we "deserve" to have that second or third McMansion

I said no such thing. You have just perjured yourself.

If I had my way, 10,000ft houses and above would be banned.

You know nothing of my beliefs or expectations on such matters.

Your reading comprehension of many of the things I've written is truly sad.

... and that the workers that build the houses have the right to drive any distance in the largest vehicle possible to build it.

Again, you just can't read can you?

1, Whoever makes the best quality for the most reasonable price should get the contract.

If you want shoddy construction from some mexican illegal immigrants, be my guest, but let's not require honest people to pay for their insurance damages when a category 1 hurricane blows away a roof or a wall that doesn't have plywood on it, because underhanded inspectors don't do their jobs.

2, A work truck is the minimal required with existing technologies. Crews already use just 1 or 2 vehicles in most cases. I already addressed your arguments, as they are totally uninformed in most cases.

3, As stated earlier, you can't leave a tool trailer at a job site in residential construction, because thieves will steal everything, and residential contractors don't make enough money to put an entire crew in a hotel over night for a week or two.

4, Nobody forces people where to choose to build their house. Typically, people build where the land prices are cheapest or where the best school is located*. Contractors go where the work is, because it's not possible to make a living on just the jobs within a few miles distance.

5, Living in rural areas is totally different than living in a city, and without people who live in rural areas, cities wouldn't be possible anyway. You live in a city because somebody in a rural area is a farmer putting food on your plate and clothes on your back, while many regulars here do nothing but push papers, or parrot what the NWS says.

The fact that he has ignored the reality of AGW, resource depletion, ocean acidification

Deception again.

Haven't ignored any of that.

Just have a different way of dealing with it, which doesn't involve crippling fundamental sectors of economics and civilization in general.

rampant corruption in the halls of government (eg Kansas),

Lol.

You clearly don't read my posts, do you?

Most of my posts or responses on such topics get deleted by the mods, because I guess they don't want anyone talking about government.

continuing extinctions, food shortages, etc. to do so is even more impressive.

Food shortages are the fault of the over-populated eastern hemisphere countries. If not for the U.S. and Brazil providing for them, they'd all starve.

Maybe that's what you want.

As I mentioned, I'd favor a coalition between the western hemisphere countries, where sovereignty would be continued, but we'd each tax our own food exports by a small, appropriate amount. We'd re-invest in clean transport technology, clean farming, and better crop strains to maximize productivity. This would drive up food prices in the Eastern Hemisphere, while not hurting our own people much, and it would discourage over-population by idiots in desert countries, while benefiting the west, who actually supports themselves and everyone else.

I've been looking for a quote (unsuccessfully) that goes something like:

Americans are addicted to consumption and like all addicts will do anything, say anything and believe in their deluded state anything that will keep that fix coming. We know its true, just look at the previous comments.

Lol @ you again.

You don't know anything about me.

This form of waste totally vexes me, and I've been trying off and on to concoct ideas of re-using the plastics efficiently.

I want to see a container tax on ridiculously small drinking bottles and ridiculously small food cans and such, because they waste material by having a low volume-to-surface ratio, and encourage "spurt consumption".

In order to discourage over-production of 20oz plastic bottles, I'd like to see a 10 cent tax on all plastic drinking bottles smaller than some (larger value) such as 1 gallon. The tax would work roughly as the reciprocal of the volume to material ratio.

This way people would re-use one small plastic bottle, and could be encouraged to buy the drinking water from a larger, more materials efficient bottle, which they could pour into the smaller one for convenience.

I figure 5 gallon bottles are less desirable because their walls are very thick, but 1 gallon bottles are a bit fatter, but still no thicker walls than a 20oz bottle, thus their volume to materials ratio is much lower. I know because I worked QA in a plastic factory, though I don't know the exact ratios for random products, but that's another matter.

Anyway, If you did 10 cents tax per small bottle, then buying a gallon of drinking water as multiple 20oz bottles would be an additional 60 cents more expensive than buying a gallon of water in an actual gallon jug. I'd tax 16oz or smaller drinking bottles at 15 cents each in order to punish them even more.

Anyway, that's the idea. Exact details in some cases would require a case by case study to see what makes sense.

Bottles and other containers for Fruit and vegetables or their juices would get an exemption since we want to encourage health. In order to qualify as a "juice" it would need to be at least 50% natural juice. This is so silly stuff like "barely flavored water" products can't get around the penalty.

The point is to encourage people to buy slightly larger amounts in more volume to material efficient ratios, so less total waste is produced.

I hope you'll see why I'm not the enemy of the environment, I just have different views about how to address it. I'd address absurd excesses and wastes first.

I am building up a light(s) in a much higher Light output then what you linked.the lamp you linked from Graingers is a 525 lumen "light".

The following LED emitter has a 9750 lumen rating at its rated current.

This emitter is 2.0 inches by 1.8 inches

This is more a long the lines of what I am building. At $800 I can do similar for $160 if I build my self and learn "stuff" as I go. Lots higher value for the buck. :)http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/LITHONIA-LED-Hig h-Bay-26X688?Pid=searchLink

My background is EE so I am designing the lights from scratch so to speak. I am at the point were I need to do prototypes (data sheets and charts etc only go so far) to test light distribution, actual foot candles at the plants (or for the building, the work/living surfaces etc). These high output emitters are not cheap ($43.00) just for the emitter. That then needs a power source (not 120 AC) this things runs from constant current so I have to design and build a constant current supply to run it.

I am evaluating if I should run a number of LED's in a grid, off the same supply, a number of supply's etc. After I get a bit of data, then I will do a cost analysis on which size of LED emitter is the most cost effective to get correct illumination over a given size of seedling bed.

You have referenced Solar. I am also just starting to learn about solar. Do you have any reputable places I can buy inverters, panels, and batteries? I expect I will use normal deep cycle Lead Acid, but I am open to suggestions.

I want solar components, not systems. I will do my own design, mounting and such.

I would like to have the solar and lighting done by late summer early fall, so some place that does not have long lead times is needed.

If you do not want to spam the blog with this kind of off topic subject, please WU mail me with any info you might have.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for all of you toread this comment before posting another word. Read itcarefully and let it soak in before your fingers hit your keyboards again.

Personal attacks are not allowed anywhere on this website and that includes Dr. Rood's blog. It is Dr.Rood's personal blog and not your own. He allows allbloggers to post here and he always answers bloggersquestions here politely.

In the last week a lot of posters have been removedalong with their comments because they keep personallyattacking other bloggers. Those attacks need to stopor you will be spending more time off line than on.

And if you don't stop, it will be progressive for longer and longer time periods. It needs to stop now.

We are peace makers, not police, but we will keep the peace around here if you don't.

Quoting pintada:Derrick Jensen in Endgame, Volume I, states that “The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system.” (127) He continues: Any economic system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid.(128)

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. (2009-02-23). Sacred Demise (p. 282). iUniverse.

I'm amazed at the brilliance with which RTS has defended the denialist position that we "deserve" to have that second or third McMansion and that the workers that build the houses have the right to drive any distance in the largest vehicle possible to build it.

The fact that he has ignored the reality of AGW, resource depletion, ocean acidification, rampant corruption in the halls of government (eg Kansas), continuing extinctions, food shortages, etc. to do so is even more impressive.

I've been looking for a quote (unsuccessfully) that goes something like:

Americans are addicted to consumption and like all addicts will do anything, say anything and believe in their deluded state anything that will keep that fix coming. We know its true, just look at the previous comments.

It's not my fault. It's an absurdity, and it doesn't take a P.H.D. to realize it's an absurdity.

It's like modeling a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico at 40C SST. It might make a good disaster movie, but it's not going to happen in real life, so don't worry about it.

In order to reach 900PPM CO2 by 2100, humans would need to increase their net production of CO2 by a factor of 2.6, which is about the same as increasing total CO2 production by a factor of 60%.

We know that's not going to happen.

Everybody is trying to cut CO2 anyway. Even the "evil" coal companies benefit by increasing efficiency and such, because they increase their profits by increasing efficiency.

I think the point of the experiment went straight over your head. They were looking at how 18 different types of sea life reacted to different c02 values. They used the experiment to produce a data set they were then able to fit a regression equation to. By using the points way beyond what we would ever experience, they were able to get a better fit for their regressions. Besides, you keep harping on these two concentrations of C02, so I assume you approve of the study based on the lower values?

I think you need to take a look at China and India's previous generation, which had a culture of 10 kids making 10 kids for 10 generations.

It is also not the fault of the U.S. or Europe when Africans and Middle Easterners keep multiplying like rabbits, even though they can't support their existing population. They could start by establishing governments and infrastructure of their own. It is, after all, Africa and the Middle East which buy the food products from the farmers and ranchers in South America, where the rain forests are destroyed to raise these crops.

Like I said, if the western hemisphere started hiking the prices on all the foods we export, you would see where the real "two year olds" are. It's Africa, Middle East, and parts of Asia who can't feed themselves, but keep making more babies.

We make the best products in the world, have the best building codes, among the cleanest environmental standards, and make the most food, but you want to blame everyone's problems on the U.S.

Meanwhile China, Pakistan, and many African nations have no labor standards, legalized slavery or defacto slavery, and no pollution standards.

Somebody must make medical supplies. It's us.Somebody must make preservatives, like vinegar and such, which we do.Somebody must make high tech products to sustain the organization and the robotics to maximize productivity. It's the U.S. in many cases.

What? Do you think it would be any cleaner if all these products were made in China or Africa? Heck no, they'd make many times as much pollution in the process, because they have no environmental or human safety standards at all.

As it is, the (Formerly) U.S. corporations leave the U.S. either due to tax code, labor laws, or due to EPA standards, and they move their official nationality to Switzerland, but operate in China or India, so they can get slave labor and pollute all they like where there are no regulations. So you can start by blaming those nations (and continents) for having no regulations, poorly enforced slavery laws, and no decent wage laws.

Derrick Jensen in Endgame, Volume I, states that “The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system.” (127) He continues: Any economic system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid.(128)

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. (2009-02-23). Sacred Demise (p. 282). iUniverse.

I'm amazed at the brilliance with which RTS has defended the denialist position that we "deserve" to have that second or third McMansion and that the workers that build the houses have the right to drive any distance in the largest vehicle possible to build it.

The fact that he has ignored the reality of AGW, resource depletion, ocean acidification, rampant corruption in the halls of government (eg Kansas), continuing extinctions, food shortages, etc. to do so is even more impressive.

I've been looking for a quote (unsuccessfully) that goes something like:

Americans are addicted to consumption and like all addicts will do anything, say anything and believe in their deluded state anything that will keep that fix coming. We know its true, just look at the previous comments.

"... look into the deeper layers of an almost tantruming insistence that as Americans we %u201Cshouldn%u2019t have to%u201D do without or be deprived. It%u2019s our inherent %u201Cright%u201D to own SUV%u2019s, plasma TV%u2019s and 6000 square-foot houses. Yet even those touting these %u201Crights%u201D know in some part of their psyches that their argument is irrational. If the majority of the earth%u2019s inhabitants cannot afford these things, then how can it be a %u201Chuman right%u201D or even an %u201CAmerican right%u201D to insist on having them? As Richard Heinberg states in%u201CWhat A Way To Go%u201D, our culture has infantilized us to such an extent that we illogically assume and even demand that we must have our gas-guzzling vehicles and all of our other %u201Ctoys%u201D that make an enormous energy footprint on the earth. And in the same documentary, its producer Sally Erickson, says it even more succinctly when she states that it is as if we are a culture of two year-olds who refuse to accept limits."

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. (2009-02-23). Sacred Demise (p. 56). iUniverse.

I think you need to take a look at China and India's previous generation, which had a culture of 10 kids making 10 kids for 10 generations.

It is also not the fault of the U.S. or Europe when Africans and Middle Easterners keep multiplying like rabbits, even though they can't support their existing population. They could start by establishing governments and infrastructure of their own. It is, after all, Africa and the Middle East which buy the food products from the farmers and ranchers in South America, where the rain forests are destroyed to raise these crops.

Like I said, if the western hemisphere started hiking the prices on all the foods we export, you would see where the real "two year olds" are. It's Africa, Middle East, and parts of Asia who can't feed themselves, but keep making more babies.

We make the best products in the world, have the best building codes, among the cleanest environmental standards, and make the most food, but you want to blame everyone's problems on the U.S.

Meanwhile China, Pakistan, and many African nations have no labor standards, legalized slavery or defacto slavery, and no pollution standards.

Somebody must make medical supplies. It's us.Somebody must make preservatives, like vinegar and such, which we do.Somebody must make high tech products to sustain the organization and the robotics to maximize productivity. It's the U.S. in many cases.

Edit:

Also countless pre-cursor chemicals used in cleansers, disinfectants, plastics, manufacturing and processing of resources, more than I can list. And without all this, those whining poor countries wouldn't have the things they do have, because they got that either from trickle down, or from donations.

It's not our fault they don't make anything worth buying.

End Edit:

What? Do you think it would be any cleaner if all these products were made in China or Africa? Heck no, they'd make many times as much pollution in the process, because they have no environmental or human safety standards at all.

As it is, the (Formerly) U.S. corporations leave the U.S. either due to tax code, labor laws, or due to EPA standards, and they move their official nationality to Switzerland, but operate in China or India, so they can get slave labor and pollute all they like where there are no regulations. So you can start by blaming those nations (and continents) for having no regulations, poorly enforced slavery laws, and no decent wage laws.

Okay expert of ocean C02 levels as it relates to sea life. I'll just take your word for it since you felt so strongly that it needed a wall of text saying little to nothing with no evidence besides having read a lot of studies. It's a shame that we are so inept at reading research and understanding data ourselves.

The "Expert" is testing an unrealistic scenario.

It's not my fault. It's an absurdity, and it doesn't take a P.H.D. to realize it's an absurdity.

It's like modeling a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico at 40C SST. It might make a good disaster movie, but it's not going to happen in real life, so don't worry about it.

In order to reach 900PPM CO2 by 2100, humans would need to increase their net production of CO2 by a factor of 2.6, which is about the same as increasing total CO2 production by a factor of 60%.

We know that's not going to happen.

Everybody is trying to cut CO2 anyway. Even the "evil" coal companies benefit by increasing efficiency and such, because they increase their profits by increasing efficiency.

People doing scientific research have a tendency to over inflate the importance of their work, so that everything is a crisis, etc.

The paper is 4 years old, and two of the concentrations they studied, 900PPM and 2800PPM, are absolutely absurd. It would take 200 years of business as usual to reach 900PPM. For 2856PPM, it's a joke, we couldn't reach that if humans were intentionally trying to pollute the environment.

What these experiments did was take creatures and dumpt them into certain conditions, which isn't what will happen even with business as usual. The author admitted there's adaptation potential.

Even the negatively affected groups are the sorts of creatures which have been around since the origin of macroscopic life. They have the genes and the life cycles to adapt, since they obviously did so in the past. We're not instantly jumping to 900 or certainly 2800PPM. You know it, and I know it, so why is that even relevant?! Even a carbon bomb situation wouldn't reach 2800PPM. That's a ridiculous, Mythbusters style, "Let's make something bad happen anyway" result, and even that didn't hurt 1/3rd of the species, it actually helped those.

All these organisms or immediate relatives, survived the cretaceous and triassic, some of them hardly changed in morphology, and they survived Chicxulub and Toba, and bi-valves and fish even survived a Super plume eruption, which supposedly lasted a million years, and you think a few PPM worth of CO2 made by humans is going to make them go extinct?!

I've read papers on this topic previously, and when you get past the scare tactics of the title, you find that the organisms are going to have time to adapt because the real world increase in CO2 is far more gradual, and across many generations, than what is done in the experiment.

Real world increase: plus 2.2PPM per year.

Experimental increase: "Here little critter, let me toss you in 2800PPM and see if you live! Muhahahaha. This is fun."

"... look into the deeper layers of an almost tantruming insistence that as Americans we “shouldn’t have to” do without or be deprived. It’s our inherent “right” to own SUV’s, plasma TV’s and 6000 square-foot houses. Yet even those touting these “rights” know in some part of their psyches that their argument is irrational. If the majority of the earth’s inhabitants cannot afford these things, then how can it be a “human right” or even an “American right” to insist on having them? As Richard Heinberg states in“What A Way To Go”, our culture has infantilized us to such an extent that we illogically assume and even demand that we must have our gas-guzzling vehicles and all of our other “toys” that make an enormous energy footprint on the earth. And in the same documentary, its producer Sally Erickson, says it even more succinctly when she states that it is as if we are a culture of two year-olds who refuse to accept limits."

People doing scientific research have a tendency to over inflate the importance of their work, so that everything is a crisis, etc.

The paper is 4 years old, and two of the concentrations they studied, 900PPM and 2800PPM, are absolutely absurd. It would take 200 years of business as usual to reach 900PPM. For 2856PPM, it's a joke, we couldn't reach that if humans were intentionally trying to pollute the environment.

What these experiments did was take creatures and dumpt them into certain conditions, which isn't what will happen even with business as usual. The author admitted there's adaptation potential.

Even the negatively affected groups are the sorts of creatures which have been around since the origin of macroscopic life. They have the genes and the life cycles to adapt, since they obviously did so in the past. We're not instantly jumping to 900 or certainly 2800PPM. You know it, and I know it, so why is that even relevant?! Even a carbon bomb situation wouldn't reach 2800PPM. That's a ridiculous, Mythbusters style, "Let's make something bad happen anyway" result, and even that didn't hurt 1/3rd of the species, it actually helped those.

All these organisms or immediate relatives, survived the cretaceous and triassic, some of them hardly changed in morphology, and they survived Chicxulub and Toba, and bi-valves and fish even survived a Super plume eruption, which supposedly lasted a million years, and you think a few PPM worth of CO2 made by humans is going to make them go extinct?!

I've read papers on this topic previously, and when you get past the scare tactics of the title, you find that the organisms are going to have time to adapt because the real world increase in CO2 is far more gradual, and across many generations, than what is done in the experiment.

Real world increase: plus 2.2PPM per year.

Experimental increase: "Here little critter, let me toss you in 2800PPM and see if you live! Muhahahaha. This is fun."

Okay expert of ocean C02 levels as it relates to sea life. I'll just take your word for it since you felt so strongly that it needed a wall of text saying little to nothing with no evidence besides having read a lot of studies. It's a shame that we are so inept at reading research and understanding data ourselves.

Quoting FLwolverine:If the crabs are growing larger faster, then won't they eat through their present food supply? It sounds like the oysters aren't able to keep up with the increased demand for their flesh.

Human emissions aren't going to keep increasing forever, but they don't have to - catastrophic harm can come to the planet if we just keep doing what we're doing now for a little while longer. Or maybe you don't agree with the climate model projections? How much time do you think we have to do some really serious mitigation?

Predator-prey relationships are self-equalizing.

If the crabs become too strong and too many, some of them will starve to death, or if it did somehow get out of control, humans will open crab seasons for longer periods and allow bigger catches, and they'll harvest them all, and seafood lovers will thank you.

Instead of critiquing the newspaper article, why don't you follow the link and read the actual scientific study? I'm sorry RTS, but your attitude over the past few days here has been one of a person trying to be an expert in every subject and it's getting old, quick.

People doing scientific research have a tendency to over inflate the importance of their work, so that everything is a crisis, etc.

The paper is 4 years old, and two of the concentrations they studied, 900PPM and 2800PPM, are absolutely absurd. It would take 200 years of business as usual to reach 900PPM. For 2856PPM, it's a joke, we couldn't reach that if humans were intentionally trying to pollute the environment.

What these experiments did was take creatures and dumpt them into certain conditions, which isn't what will happen even with business as usual. The author admitted there's adaptation potential.

Even the negatively affected groups are the sorts of creatures which have been around since the origin of macroscopic life. They have the genes and the life cycles to adapt, since they obviously did so in the past. We're not instantly jumping to 900 or certainly 2800PPM. You know it, and I know it, so why is that even relevant?! Even a carbon bomb situation wouldn't reach 2800PPM. That's a ridiculous, Mythbusters style, "Let's make something bad happen anyway" result, and even that didn't hurt 1/3rd of the species, it actually helped those.

All these organisms or immediate relatives, survived the cretaceous and triassic, some of them hardly changed in morphology, and they survived Chicxulub and Toba, and bi-valves and fish even survived a Super plume eruption, which supposedly lasted a million years, and you think a few PPM worth of CO2 made by humans is going to make them go extinct?!

I've read papers on this topic previously, and when you get past the scare tactics of the title, you find that the organisms are going to have time to adapt because the real world increase in CO2 is far more gradual, and across many generations, than what is done in the experiment.

Real world increase: plus 2.2PPM per year.

Experimental increase: "Here little critter, let me toss you in 2800PPM and see if you live! Muhahahaha. This is fun."

You don't actually expect crabs or oysters or related food web organisms to go extinct from CO2 emissions, do you?

Human emissions aren't going to keep increasing forever, because transition to other technologies will eventually happen, either by force from governments, or by natural cost issues.

If the crabs are growing larger faster, then won't they eat through their present food supply? It sounds like the oysters aren't able to keep up with the increased demand for their flesh.

Human emissions aren't going to keep increasing forever, but they don't have to - catastrophic harm can come to the planet if we just keep doing what we're doing now for a little while longer. Or maybe you don't agree with the climate model projections? How much time do you think we have to do some really serious mitigation?

Unfortunately, like most science articles, it's full of anecdotes instead of actual information. Concentrations of "high," "low," and "clean" don't say much without a precise unitary definition of what they called "high" and "low".

If the crabs and oysters survived the Triassic, then surely they'll survive now.

Instead of critiquing the newspaper article, why don't you follow the link and read the actual scientific study? I'm sorry RTS, but your attitude over the past few days here has been one of a person trying to be an expert in every subject and it's getting old, quick.

Quoting Xulonn: It's not about survival. Even from a human perspective, it's about another small piece of the puzzle regarding the web of life on earth, and in particular, a tiny piece of the human food supply.

I'm not sure you're grasping the implications of Dr. Rood's blog posts, especially regarding the complexity of systems and the difficulty of modeling the dynamics of such system. However, if you read a bit more, you can learn a lot about how science works.

I am fortunate in having learned ecosystem dynamics basic from Professor Arnold Schultz at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s, but with the both the internet and online book sellers, anyone can learn a lot about ecosystems and other system dynamics with just a little effort.

And you really cannot understand AGW/CC without understanding the basics of systems and systems dynamics.

You don't actually expect crabs or oysters or related food web organisms to go extinct from CO2 emissions, do you?

Human emissions aren't going to keep increasing forever, because transition to other technologies will eventually happen, either by force from governments, or by natural cost issues.

Presently, the biggest threat to fisheries is fishing itself, not the pollution. It's just the shear volume of biomass we removed from the oceans as part of everyone's diet.

For example, Squid fishers go out and catch millions of pounds in one night with nothing but a light trap and a net. It's very "clean" compared to some other forms of fishing, but it kills the food web anyway. yet the nutrionists tell everyone we aren't eating enough fish and seafood anyway. If we ate what they tell everyone to eat, the food web would be dead already.

They didn't specify what "high" concentration was, and they speculated that the effects on the crabs at such concentration was caused by oxygen loss. HO high do you think CO2 has to be in the water before it brings oxygen concentration below cretaceous or Triassic levels?

The test scenario is absurd, because it is testing conditions which would never occur globally in the next couple centuries, even with business as usual. Just tell businesses they can't pump all their garbage in the bay; do something else with it, that's all, the crabs and the food web will be fine.

Some other alternatives are to cancel oyster and crab seasons in the bay for the next several years, and let the populations grow back to pre-industrial levels. The bay would be pristine again, and then you'd be complaining about having too many of them.

Everyone can't live in a big city, even in the most idealized scenario.

There's still farmers, ranchers, and lumber, and because of that there will always be other jobs in rural, sub-urban areas, and non-metropolis areas.

I seriously doubt hydroponics or aeroponics in a $500 per square foot high rise building will ever happen, except in some weird one in a million situation.

The metal that goes into all those buildings in New York comes from Pittsburgh, and the Coal they use for coking probably comes from Canada or some place else (I don't know). The point is, New York isn't anywhere near self-sufficient, and wouldn't be anywhere near self-sufficient even if it got 100% of it's power from local renewables. The carbon footprint for a steel building is so high it's completely ridiculous; mining, transport, refining, melting, coking, molding, pressing, transporting again.

Even if a modern electric foundry is powered by nuke or renewables, it still needs the coal for coking, so you can't avoid making at least a certain amount of CO2 when making steel.

You'll see, because my 90 to 110 Billion dollars figure for carbon tax was for oil alone. I didn't even do coal or natural gas, and I didn't do chemicals or metals which make CO2 for other reasons during processing. The cost of making a metal building, such as New York is filled with, will be hurt very much as well, which means your idealized scenario of trying to make everyone live within 3 miles of everything else (arcology) is going to be hurt just as bad.

You see how this works? Those wind turbines are made from steel, which uses coal anyway to make them. Even though they are much cleaner long term, the carbon tax would increase the cost of making a wind turbine, and the metal wires for the power lines, as I mentioned earlier, and remember, because wind turbines are distributed power sources, the amount of wires you need for thousands of square miles worth of turbines is absolutely phenomenal. It'll be like an entire city worth of power lines off shore. Since you need massive redundancy for a "smart grid" to stay up and swap loads to the place where the most energy is produced and the most energy is needed, then you need massive parallelism and switching as well. All of that requires more steel and other metals. All of that requires carbon, and will get taxed. Though they may make vouchers/rebates to pay it back, but who knows, and like I said, that requires more inspectors and auditors to be sure people aren't cheating...

My solutions would not be perfect either, but I'd pay for the new technologies with several measures, I already mentioned some of them, but people aren't aware of how much money is going to the tycoons and the circus clowns. It's a big chunk of the GDP, through one mechanism or another.

A 10% millionaire's tax would hit both the tycoons and the circus clowns directly.

A 10% Luxury tax on ticket sales would also be in order.

Sports ticketsMovie and concert ticketstheatre/opera/ballet, etc ticketsDisney and other theme parksCruise lines4 Star or better hotel rooms and similar stuff.

A 10% VAT tax on all souvenirs and memorabilia related to those things.

It might not be possible to get some organizations which only exist in one state, because the states have power to regulate that commerce, but the Federal govt. has power to regulate interstate commerce, which college and professional sports leagues are interstate commerce, as is the movie industry and music industry.

Since these taxes only punish people who waste resources anyway, they are much more fair than the carbon tax. I would then spend something like half the revenues on cancelling debts and deficits, and the other half on R&D, vouchers, and rebates for investments in renewable.

Now look at the difference.

I'm suggesting taxing excess and waste in proportion to that excess and waste.

They want to tax fundamental building materials and the energy required to make them.

Uh, point of order: I didn't say 3 miles. I said everyone should ideally do business within a population of a certain amount. So if you are a plumber, your area is say 15000 households. In NYC that is.. no idea, say 2 miles. If you live in Alaska, that is realistically 1000 miles (no really, i've worked with electricians who were in the pribilofs on monday/tuesday and in cordova the rest of the week. (Boy did they NOT take more than a suitcase of tools with them!)

But whether ALaska or NYC, the point is build a community that knows your work, gives references, etc.

I don't have time to read/disgest the rest of your post. i agree though, for what I took out of it quickly, that i would tax things very differently than they are taxed now. But that is because I am a community-ist at heart and see, like I think you do, a big difference between productive necessary work and clown luxury work.

Now that is truly a statement that absolutely fails to grasp the potential implications of the trend, and shows a complete lack of understanding of how scientists observe things and form postulates.

Try to think logically and consider multiple factors, and you'll make progress towards understanding the implications of global warming. The complex web of food production by humans has evolved since our species started exploiting them. We've exhausted and/or destroyed many parts of the food production system that humans rely on in many ways in many locations, and there is a fear among scientists and informed laypersons (like me) that AGW/CC will have a net negative impact on that global food production system.

If I were a scientist or grad student looking for a research subject, and had expertise in the field, I would ask myself "what are the possible implications of this study, and how can I design a research project to examine and evaluate those implications.

Some of the first questions that might come to mind for creative thinkers - and it's nearly always in the form of questions, not naive and unsupported statements - could include:

- What are the roles of these two creatures in their ecosystem and how do they contribute to overall balance and stability of that system.

- What is the value of each of these species to the production of food for humans, and what are the implications of these changes to this balance of species on the extractive food production they provide.

- How could this change in prey-predator relationship affect their populations and the overall balance of the ecosystem, and are there other significant implications not-related to food production for humans.

- etc,. etc.

To simply say that they survived the Triassic and therefore they will survive AGW/CC is a limited and naive evaluation. It's not about survival. Even from a human perspective, it's about another small piece of the puzzle regarding the web of life on earth, and in particular, a tiny piece of the human food supply.

I'm not sure you're grasping the implications of Dr. Rood's blog posts, especially regarding the complexity of systems and the difficulty of modeling the dynamics of such system. However, if you read a bit more, you can learn a lot about how science works.

I am fortunate in having learned ecosystem dynamics basic from Professor Arnold Schultz at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s, but with the both the internet and online book sellers, anyone can learn a lot about ecosystems and other system dynamics with just a little effort.

And you really cannot understand AGW/CC without understanding the basics of systems and systems dynamics.

Thank you for this link. I just spend $160 for the junk to build up a high output LED light (one off for test and measurement/evaluation). Two goals, put all LED lighting in a building I am putting up(I want it to run off solar), and also to convert all the plant lights away from Florescent (never did the HID, it gave me a rash for the energy in versus light out).

My wife the gardener is having a hissy fit that LED will not work, the spectrum is incorrect. Her physics is a bit shaky so she is quoting a 40 year old book. Sound familiar for another argument(s) common on this sight? :)

This article could not have come a better time for me.

On a side note, while doing an internet search to see what was "out there" for commercial LED grow lights I discovered they are doing a booming business for the Pot growers. LED does not have the "heat" signature like HID and Florescent so the grower can put their "gardens" in aluminum foil tents (for sale with the LED grow lights) so that the snooping DEA can not see them with IR cameras. So funny.

Don't know what you mean by "high output", but this looks like a good deal to me:

The thing is, I've got a lot of expereince int eh construction industry. Maybe not as much as you but enough that i am not intimidated by your common sense (not that i think you are trying to intimidate me, just that I've been there as well).

Most of the answers I hear you giving, to me, are just argumentative. For example, working in New York city, almost everyone either went to work and took the work truck to the cite or else took public transportation. Same thing in Long Island. Alaska was a mix but Alaska is Alaska. etc. etc. The point is that each situation was different but most people didn't feel like having to deal with the hassle of commuting. That is why crew cabs were invented. What you almost never see happen on a construction site is that X people take X cars to a job (X > 2).

So if gas goes up to $10 per gallon, the contractor is facing having to cut back on travel, employees have to find a way to commute to work, etc. But it is not even close to the scenario you are painting of 4 guys carrying tools on the back of an electric scooter.

Besides, you haven't addressed the strawman of the 50 mile radius, i.e. that systems have worked in the past without having a 50 mile radius and that by your arguments, having a 100 mile radius would be even better. (By my arguments, having a limited population coverage zone would work best actually, i.e. 3 miles in densely populated zones, 500 miles in somewhere like Alaska - not just for the transportation but also for community and other things that are lacking in a giga-opolis.)

Finally,if you don't like change just because it is change, join the club. But try thinking about this from the point of view that if we don't solve this, there will be no work for anyone. It isn't just about liking electric scooters. This isn't a snarky question but suppose you had to solve this problem, what would you do? I really am really curious to know your opinion as to what steps to take, it isn't an argumentative question.

Everyone can't live in a big city, even in the most idealized scenario.

There's still farmers, ranchers, and lumber, and because of that there will always be other jobs in rural, sub-urban areas, and non-metropolis areas.

I seriously doubt hydroponics or aeroponics in a $500 per square foot high rise building will ever happen, except in some weird one in a million situation.

The metal that goes into all those buildings in New York comes from Pittsburgh, and the Coal they use for coking probably comes from Canada or some place else (I don't know). The point is, New York isn't anywhere near self-sufficient, and wouldn't be anywhere near self-sufficient even if it got 100% of it's power from local renewables. The carbon footprint for a steel building is so high it's completely ridiculous; mining, transport, refining, melting, coking, molding, pressing, transporting again.

Even if a modern electric foundry is powered by nuke or renewables, it still needs the coal for coking, so you can't avoid making at least a certain amount of CO2 when making steel.

You'll see, because my 90 to 110 Billion dollars figure for carbon tax was for oil alone. I didn't even do coal or natural gas, and I didn't do chemicals or metals which make CO2 for other reasons during processing. The cost of making a metal building, such as New York is filled with, will be hurt very much as well, which means your idealized scenario of trying to make everyone live within 3 miles of everything else (arcology) is going to be hurt just as bad.

You see how this works? Those wind turbines are made from steel, which uses coal anyway to make them. Even though they are much cleaner long term, the carbon tax would increase the cost of making a wind turbine, and the metal wires for the power lines, as I mentioned earlier, and remember, because wind turbines are distributed power sources, the amount of wires you need for thousands of square miles worth of turbines is absolutely phenomenal. It'll be like an entire city worth of power lines off shore. Since you need massive redundancy for a "smart grid" to stay up and swap loads to the place where the most energy is produced and the most energy is needed, then you need massive parallelism and switching as well. All of that requires more steel and other metals. All of that requires carbon, and will get taxed. Though they may make vouchers/rebates to pay it back, but who knows, and like I said, that requires more inspectors and auditors to be sure people aren't cheating...

My solutions would not be perfect either, but I'd pay for the new technologies with several measures, I already mentioned some of them, but people aren't aware of how much money is going to the tycoons and the circus clowns. It's a big chunk of the GDP, through one mechanism or another.

A 10% millionaire's tax would hit both the tycoons and the circus clowns directly.

A 10% Luxury tax on ticket sales would also be in order.

Sports ticketsMovie and concert ticketstheatre/opera/ballet, etc ticketsDisney and other theme parksCruise lines4 Star or better hotel rooms and similar stuff.

A 10% VAT tax on all souvenirs and memorabilia related to those things.

It might not be possible to get some organizations which only exist in one state, because the states have power to regulate that commerce, but the Federal govt. has power to regulate interstate commerce, which college and professional sports leagues are interstate commerce, as is the movie industry and music industry.

Since these taxes only punish people who waste resources anyway, they are much more fair than the carbon tax. I would then spend something like half the revenues on cancelling debts and deficits, and the other half on R&D, vouchers, and rebates for investments in renewable.

Now look at the difference.

I'm suggesting taxing excess and waste in proportion to that excess and waste.

They want to tax fundamental building materials and the energy required to make them.

Quoting Skyepony:ENSO is a well studied phenomenon of the ocean heat sinking & then later releasing it to both the atmosphere & space. T-depth anomalies. surface is the top right is equatorial epac, left is west.

Exactly. Because unlike what some with a bit too much hubris might suggest, physics is working exactly as physics works. It's really just that a particular person has confused convection and conduction, not to mention the simple concept that ocean currents exist, and oceans cannot only move in an upward direction.